Fuzzies and Other People

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

YVES JANIVER WATCHED the people in front of him sit down, and wondered how many of them knew. The press hadn’t been allowed to get hold of it, but rumor had a million roots and it was probably all over the place. Everybody inside the dividing-rail except the six Fuzzies probably knew, and half the crowd in the spectator’s seats. Over to his right, Victor Grego and Leslie Coombes and Jack Holloway and the others were getting the Fuzzies quieted. They all knew. So did Gus Brannhard, with his assistants at the prosecution table; he was almost audibly purring. At the table on the left, Leo Thaxter, Conrad and Rose Evins and Phil Novaes were whispering. Every few seconds, one of them would glance to the rear of the room. Surely they knew. The way rumors circulated in that jail, they probably knew better than anybody else, and maybe up to a quarter of it would be true.

The crier had finished calling the case, naming, one after another, all the people, human and otherwise, who had the Colony of Zarathustra against them. He counted ten seconds, then tapped with the gavel.

“Are we ready?” he asked.

Gus Brannhard rose. “The prosecution is ready, Your Honor.”

Leslie Coombes popped up as he sat down. “The defense, for Diamond, Allan Pinkerton, Arsene Lupin, Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler and Mata Hari is ready.”

The names that came before Native Cases Court! Some day, he was sure, he would be trying Mohandas Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer for murder.

The four defendants on his left argued heatedly for a moment. Then Conrad Evins, impelled by his wife, rose and cleared his throat.

“Please the court,” he said. “Our attorney seems to have been delayed. If the court will be so good as to wait, I’m sure Mr. Ingermann will be here in a few minutes.”

Good Heavens, they didn’t know! He wondered what was wrong with the jail-house grapevine. Gus Brannhard was rising again.

“Your Honor, I’m afraid we’ll have to wait a trifle more than a few minutes,” he said. “I was informed last evening that when the Terra-Baldur-Marduk liner City of Konkrook spaced out from Darius at 1430 yesterday, Mr. Hugo Ingermann was aboard as a passenger, with a ticket for Kapstaad Spaceport on Terra. The first port of call en route is New Birmingham, on Volund. She is now hyperspace; relative to this space-time continuum, these defendants’ counsel is literally nowhere.”

There was a sound — the odd, familiar sound that follows a surprise in a courtroom, not unlike an airlock being opened onto lower pressure. More of this crowd than he’d thought hadn’t heard about it. There were chuckles, and not all from the Fuzzy defense table.

There was no sound at all from Evins and his co-defendants. Then Evins started. Janiver had seen a man shot once in a duel on Ishtar; his whole body had jerked like that when he had been hit. Rose Evins, who had not risen, merely closed her eyes and relaxed in her chair, her hands loose on the table in front of her. Phil Novaes was gibbering, “I don’t believe it! It’s a lie! He couldn’t do that!” Then Leo Thaxter was on his feet, bellowing obscenities.

“You mean we don’t have any lawyer?” Evins was demanding.

“Is this absolutely certain, Mr. Brannhard?” the judge asked, for the record.

Brannhard nodded gravely, the gravity a trifle forced.

“Absolutely, Your Honor. I had it from Mr. Grego here, who had it from Terra-Baldur-Marduk on Darius. I saw a photoprint of the passenger list with Mr. Ingermann’s name, special luxury-cabin accommodations.”

“Yes, that’s how the son of a bitch would be traveling,” Thaxter shouted. “On our money. You know what he took with him? Two hundred and fifty thousand sols in sunstones!”

There was another whoosh of surprise from in front. It even extended to the Fuzzy defense table. Grego snapped his fingers and said audibly, “By God, that’s it! That’s where they went!” The judge graveled briskly and called for order; the crier repeated the call, and the uproar died away.

“You will have to repeat that statement under veridication, Mr. Thaxter,” he said.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Thaxter told him. “What we’ll tell about that crook…”

“What we want to know,” Evins said, “is what about us? We have a legal right to a lawyer…”

“You had a lawyer. You should have chosen a better one. Now sit down, you people, and be quiet. The court is quite aware of your legal rights, and will appoint a counsel for you.”

Who the devil would that be? This crowd had no money to hire a lawyer; the Colony would have to pay the fee. It would have to be a good one, with a solid reputation. Janiver was, himself, convinced of the guilt of all four of them; that meant he’d have to lean over backward to give them a scrupulously fair trial before sentencing them to be shot.

“Your Honor.” Leslie Coombes was on his feet. “I move for dismissal of the charges against my clients.” He named them. “They are here charged on complaints brought by Hugo Ingermann, who has since absconded from the planet, merely as a maneuver to discredit the charges against his own clients.”

“Motion granted; these six Fuzzies should not have been charged in the first place.” He said that over, in the proper phraseology, and discharged the six Fuzzies from the custody of the court.

“Since these remaining defendants are entitled to the legal aid and advice of which the defection of their attorney has deprived them, I will continue this case on Monday of next week, by which time the court will have appointed a new counsel for them, and he will have had opportunity to familiarize himself with the case and consult with them. Marshal Fane, will you return the defendants to the jail? We will now take up the next ready case on the docket.”

THE GOVERNMENT WAS a representative popular democracy — the Federation Constitution said it had to be — and the Charterless Zarathustra Company was a dictatorship. One difference is that when a dictator wants privacy, he gets it. So, though they would have dinner at Government House, they were having koktel-drinko in Grego’s office at Company House. The Fuzzies were all at the Fuzzy Club, entertaining Wise One and his band, who were completely flabbergasted about everything, but deliriously happy.

Grego and Coombes were drinking cocktails. Gus, of course, had a water tumbler full of whisky, and a bottle within reach to take care of evaporation loss. Ben Rainsford had a highball, very weak. Jack had a highball, rather less so. He set it down to light his pipe, and didn’t pick it up again. He was going to make this one last as long as he could.

“Well, it’s a new high in disposal cost,” Coombes was saying. “Two hundred and fifty thousand sols to get rid of Hugo Ingermann seems just a bit exorbitant.”

“It’s worth it,” Grego told him. “He’d have cost us a couple of million if he’d stayed on this planet. It’ll be up to you to cut the cost as much as you can.”

“Well, I can get judgments against everything he left, but that isn’t much. One thing, we have all that property in North Mallorysport. Now we don’t need to be afraid that somebody like Pan-Federation or Terra-Odin will get hold of it and put in a spaceport to compete with Terra-Baldur-Marduk on Darius.”

“What I want to know,” Ben Rainsford began, frowning into his drink, “is how Ingermann got hold of those sunstones. I don’t understand how they even got out of Company House.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Gus Brannhard said. “We got all that out of Evins and Thaxter this afternoon. The Fuzzies didn’t take them out of the gem-vault at all. Evins had taken them out in his pockets a couple of days before. He stashed them in a locker at the Mallorysport-Darius space terminal and mailed the key to a poste-restante code-number. He memorized the number and gave it to Ingermann after he was arrested. Ingermann lifted the stones for his fee. What that did, it made Ingermann liable to accessory-after-the-fact and receiving-stolen-goods charges. Evins and his wife and Thaxter thought they could control Ingermann that way. Well, you see how it worked.”

“Well, won’t they catch up with Ingermann?”

“Huh-uh. We’ll send out a warrant for him, but you know how slow interstellar communication is. What he’ll do, as soon as he lands on Terra he’ll take another ship out for somewhere else. There only are about twenty spaceships leaving for Terra every day, for all over the galaxy. He’ll get to some planet like Xipototec or Fenris or Ithavoll Lugaluru and dig in there, and nobody’ll ever find him. Who wants to find him? I don’t.”

“Well, what’s going to be done about Thaxter and the Evinses and Novaes? That’s what I want to know,” Rainsford said. “They’re not going to walk away from this, are they?”

“Oh, no,” Gus Brannhard assured him. “Janiver appointed Douglas Toyoshi to defend them, Doug and Janiver and I got together in Janiver’s chambers and made a deal. They’ll plead guilty to the sunstone charges, and will immediately be sentenced, ten-to-twenty years. After that, they will be put on trial on the faginy and enslavement charges. There’s no question about their being convicted.”

“Faginy too?” Coombes asked.

“Faginy too. Toyoshi will accept Pendarvis’s minor-child ruling. Not that that will matter in principle; the whole body of the Pendarvis Decisions, minor-child status and all, is going into the Colonial Constitution. Well, when they are convicted of enslavement and faginy, they will be sentenced to be shot, separately on each charge, two sentences to a customer. Execution will be deferred until they have completed their prison sentences, and the death sentences will then be subject to review by the court.”

Coombes laughed. “They won’t be likely to bother the parole board in the meantime,” he commented.

“No. And I doubt, after twenty years, if any court would order them shot. They’re getting just about what they paid Ingermann to get them.”

No; there was a big difference. They’d be convicted and sentenced, and that was what Jack wanted: to get it established that the law protected Fuzzies the same as other people. He said so, and finished his drink, wondering if he oughtn’t to have another. Grego had said something about Ingermann, and Rainsford laughed.

“Wise One and his gang are heroes all over again, for running him off Zarathustra.” He laughed again. “Chased out by a gang of Fuzzies!”

“What’s going to happen to them? They can’t be career heroes the rest of their lives.”

“They won’t have to be,” Coombes said. “I have adopted the whole eight of them.”

“What?”

The Company lawyer nodded. “That’s right. Got the adoptions fixed up Saturday. I am now Pappy Less’ee, with papers to prove it.” He finished his cocktail. “You know, I never realized till I brought that gang in last Monday what I was missing.” He looked around, at Pappy Vic and Pappy Jack and Pappy Ben and Pappy Gus. “You all know what I mean.”

“But you’re going to Terra after the general election; you’ll be gone for a couple of years. Who’ll take care of them while you’re gone?”

“I will. I am taking my family with me,” Coombes said.

The idea of taking Fuzzies off Zarathustra hadn’t occurred to Jack Holloway, and he was automatically against it.

“It’ll be all right, Jack. Juan Jimenez’s people tell me that a Fuzzy will be perfectly able to adapt to Terran conditions; won’t even need to adapt. They’ll be as healthy there as they are here.”

That much was right. Conditions were practically identical on both planets.

“And they’ll be happy, Jack,” Coombes was saying. “They just want to be with Pappy Less’ee. You know, I never had anybody love me the way those Fuzzies do. And everybody on Terra will be crazy about them.”

That was it. That was what Fuzzies wanted, more than chopper-diggers and shoulder bags, more than rifles and things to play with and learning about the Big Ones’ talk-marks, more even than Extee-Three: affection. It had been the need for that, he knew now, that had brought Little Fuzzy to him out of the woods, and the others after him. More than anything he could give, it was Little Fuzzy’s promise that all Fuzzies would have Big Ones of their own to love them and take care of them and be good to them that appealed to the Fuzzies at Hoksu-Mitto. They needed affection as they needed air and water, just as all children did.

That was what they were — permanent children. The race would mature, sometime in the far future. But meanwhile, these dear, happy, loving little golden-furred children would never grow up. He picked up his glass and finished it, then sat holding it, looking at the ice in it, and felt a great happiness relaxing him. He hadn’t anything to worry about. The Fuzzies wouldn’t ever turn into anything else. They’d just stay Fuzzies: active, intelligent children, who loved to hunt and romp and make things and find things out, but children who would always have to be watched over and taken care of and loved. He must have realized that, subconsciously, from the beginning when he’d started Little Fuzzy to calling him Pappy Jack.

And gosh! Eight Fuzzies going for a big-big trip with Pappy Less’ee. New things to see, and Pappy Less’ee to show them everything and tell them about it. And after a few years, they’d come back… and all the wonderful things they’d have to tell.

He let Grego take his glass and mix him another highball, then picked it up and relighted the pipe that had gone out.

Damned if he didn’t wish sometimes that he was a Fuzzy!